Chapter 8 #5
Her bones began to creak, her hair turned silver, her skin sagged. No matter what I did to ensure she never knew pain, I felt the mortal clock ticking with every second that passed.
While few made it to her age in the wandering tribes on the ice, Yuka had no aches, no qualms, nothing that might trouble a human.
The woman and her wolf wrote their story until age eighty, one hundred, and by one hundred and twelve, my healing touch no longer sufficed.
I had no god to pray to as I watched the inevitable approach. There was no one to beg. I’d known loss before, but I was less prepared than ever.
Her cells wore off more quickly than I could fix. Her muscles fought me at every step. She kept her hand on my snout all day and I remained a wolf at night so she might lean against me, never bothered with the presence of a man unless we had sat for intentional conversation.
“What did you call me?” she asked one night. “In the other lives, that is.”
I was the age I’d been the night I emerged from the neck of her tent. Holding my perfect, elderly human against the bed of furs, I hadn’t aged while time had weathered her face. I stroked her hair, kissing her scalp as I breathed in the fresh scent of her soul.
“You were Shala in the first life,” I said quietly, as if telling her a bedtime story. “You were Eleni in the next. And that’s when you asked me not to call you by your mortal names.”
The cavernous lines around Yuka’s face deepened. Her eyes closed. “What were you to call me instead?”
It was the fourth time I experienced the situation in my endless existence: I wanted to cry.
“We didn’t get the chance to pick a name, though there’s only one that makes sense to me.”
Her breathing slowed as she began to drift to sleep. “Mmm?”
“No matter who, or where, or what, you are my only human. To me, you are Love.”
The late summer sun had set on her one-hundred and thirteenth birthday before she’d turned to ask me a question.
She didn’t have time to ask before I saw the slip of her spirit.
I was in a man’s body in an instant, catching her, holding her body and soul as I begged her with silent, determined eyes to stay on this earth.
“Not yet,” I insisted. “We have another summer. Give me one more year.”
“My wolf, my star…”
I blinked back the threat of tears.
“Yuka, please—”
“Didn’t we decide you’re not to call me mortal names? You’ve found me in other lives, did you not? You haven’t left my side in this one. How weak do you think my faith is if I wouldn’t trust that you’ll find me in the next? I won’t be Yuka then.”
“I’m not ready.”
“Call me by my name,” she said. “And let me follow the North Star home.”
A chilled tear fell. “Please, Love.”
“You have to let me go,” she whispered.
The weather seemed to agree. The edges of the tent trembled as a late-season storm moved the sealskin furs. The first drops of rain threatened to turn our peaceful night into something else. “My beautiful wolf. My savior. The star who became a man. My time has come.”
I shook my head. “You don’t have to die. You can finish your mortal cycle. Come with me. We can go to my realm together. You won’t grow old, or tired, or—”
“No,” she said quietly. “I did good in this life, and I’ll do good in the next.”
“I don’t think you understand.” I didn’t care if it was insulting.
Call it denial, call it bargaining, I wasn’t ready.
“I’m not telling you to remain one hundred and thirteen on the ice.
I’m saying you can join immortality. It’s not the afterlife humans describe.
This would be us. You and me. It’s like… it’s like becoming a god. It’s like—”
I couldn’t think of a time I’d rambled before this moment.
Tears were still unfamiliar to me. I wasn’t sure as to the sensation when uncomfortable heat spiked along my eyes. I grimaced against the pain as it slithered into my chest. “Please,” I said quietly. “I’ve asked so little of you. Yuka—”
“Three names, yet none of them feel honest on your lips. In each life, you call to my body, but not my soul. Look at me,” she smiled, wrinkled lips cracking, eyes crinkling. “I was beautiful once, perhaps. But you aren’t here for my body. Name my soul. It’s her you seek.”
My lip quivered. “I’m supposed to be the one who gives advice.”
Bent, papery fingers brushed against my face as she cupped my cheek, wiping my tears. “I have a plan. We’ll play a game, you and I.”
My hands slid over hers, tender against knobby knuckles and thin, loose skin as I tightened her hold against me.
“Shh, shh. This body’s time has come. You were wolf, you were man, you were spirit, you were god. You remember all things, but perhaps I remember, too.”
I didn’t want to tell her that no, humans did not remember.
She would forget me the moment her soul passed. I would be left to grieve, to mourn, to be abandoned once more the moment she escaped my hold. She would be on to new things, and I would be trapped for one hundred years more in my desperate cycle.
“I’ve always liked snow hares,” she said. “Peaceful, curious. They look like messengers from the underworld, don’t you think?”
“Hares?” If I hadn’t fought for her healing, I would have been worried she was battling confusion.
“The game.” She smiled. “Pay attention.”
“Snow hares,” I repeated.
I wrapped my free arm around her, cradling her as she began to drift backward. Raindrops began to pelt the tent with methodical beats. It wasn’t a fall, not truly. It was more like sleep called her name, and she listened to its soft voice.
“A wolf would be too easy,” she said, voice growing softer as her lids flitted shut. “A hare, however. That would be quite the trick.”
“Yu—” I bit the name off. I couldn’t bring myself to dishonor her wish. “I’m as old as time,” I told her. “I didn’t begin to number the years until I met you, for they were meaningless. I didn’t know what it was to be mortal. I didn’t know what it was to love.”
I wasn’t finished with my speech. My chest ached with unspoken words. I had so much to say, to confess, to hope and demand and beg, but her muscles slackened.
“Love,” she repeated, echoing my final word. “Only Love, from this life until the end.”
It was the last thing she said on the earth before her ghost joined the pink and green slashes of the Northern Lights, another spirit in the Arctic to dance above the ones who’d lost them.
When I wept, the sky joined me.